People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range.

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).

Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.